Sniffing it Out

This dog is trained to find computers and stop crimes
Police across the US have been using Electronic Storage Detection dogs to sniff out technology as evidence.

She's also a graduate of an elite K-9 search class that trains dogs to sniff out electronics, including phones , hard drives and microSD cards smaller than your thumb.
Tales from the underdog

Dogs are built to smell.

Where we might smell pizza, a dog could pick out the wheat in the crust and the tomatoes, oregano, basil and mozzarella in the topping. A dog trainer told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that if you took all the olfactory receptor cells out of a human and spread them with a butter knife, you would get a smear the size of a postage stamp. A dog's smelling cells would cover a tea towel.

So it made sense when a major in the Connecticut State Police's computer crimes department asked its K-9 academy — the longest-running K-9 police school in the US — if a dog could sniff out thumb drives.

To find out, Jack Hubball, a chemist with Connecticut's Forensic Science Laboratory, ordered thumb drives, SD cards and hard drives from multiple manufacturers. And he learned all memory devices use a chemical compound called triphenylphosphine oxide, or TPPO. That was the break they needed.

Once they had isolated the common chemical, the state's K-9 trainers could begin to train the first ESD dog in 2012. They spent up to six months "imprinting" the chemical odor on a black Lab named Selma.

Over and over again, they got her to smell a white, odorless (to us) powder, and then fed her. Selma eventually associated the scent with food and would search out the smell for a reward. And she found devices that had completely escaped investigators. They kept the program a secret for four years, says Halligan, to make sure there weren't any surprise issues.